Here’s How Black Women, Korean Men Date the Same

Another day, another study on dating and marriage for black women. The latest wave of research has come from online dating sites, which has analyzed the dating habits and behaviors of folks on some of the most popular sites. Well, eHarmony recently released data that reveals something new about the dating behavior of black women: They have a preference for intra-ethnic dating rivaled only by Korean men. FiveThirtyEight has the story:

The data reveals a clear pattern: People are interested in people like themselves. Women on eHarmony favor men who are similar not just in obvious ways — age, attractiveness, education, income — but also in less apparent ones, such as creativity. Even when eHarmony includes a quirky data point — like how many pictures are included in a user’s profile — women are more likely to message men similar to themselves. In fact, of the 102 traits in the data set, there was not one for which women were more likely to contact men with opposite traits.

Men were a little more open-minded. For 80 percent of traits, they were more willing to message those different from them. They still preferred mates who were similar in terms of height or attractiveness, but they cared less about these traits — and they didn’t care much at all about other things women cared about, like similarity in education level or number of photos taken.They cared less about whether their match shared their ethnicity.

Everyone claims that ethnicity matters to them about the same amount (4.2), but some ethnicities show much stronger preferences. Men are more likely to message women who drink more even if they claim to want women who don’t drink at all. (This remained true even when I controlled for attractiveness, age and whether the woman messaged the man, and even when I looked only at men who rated their drinking preference as important.)

Check out this infographic from FiveThirtyEight:

Looking at the data collected by EHarmony it’s clear though that of all the gender-ethnic groups that have a strong preference for dating within their ethnicity, black women and Korean men rank the highest. It’s important to note, however, that the preference from Korean men (18.3%) is almost matched by Korean women (12.8%,) while there’s actually a 20.5% difference between black men and women.